MIFF Missive: Iron Winter & Romería
Subscribe to The Curb podcast via RSS feed, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or iHeart Radio. Download the episode directly here. In their first conversation Nadine and Virat speak about two films which are…
Reviews
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MIFF Review: Fwends is a tender portrait of friendship, loss, and rediscovery
We’ve all been there — that bittersweet moment when you reconnect with an old friend. Maybe it’s someone you thought you’d never lose touch with, someone who once felt like your closest ally through l…
MIFF Review: Videoheaven is a neat look at the cultural impact of video stores, but feels like a relic of the past
It’s rather strange to think of the video store as extinct. For American filmmakers like Alex Ross Perry, the video store’s death knell coincided well before the 2012 release of This Means War; where…
Scrap: Life, Love, and the Small Victories That Keep Us Going
There’s a quiet intensity to Scrap that sneaks up on you. At first glance, it might seem like another indie drama following a woman through a rough patch in Los Angeles, but this film is so much more…
MIFF Review: Redux Redux is one of the smartest films of the year
The blazing opening scene of the McManus Brothers’ science fiction thriller Redux Redux promises a white-knuckle ride: a promise that it keeps while revealing a deep sense of humanity and longing whic…
MIFF Review: Michel Gondry’s whimsical stop-motion adventure Maya, Give Me a Title is a labour of paternal love
Maya, Give Me a Title (Maya, Donne-moi un Titre) is a sweet and imaginative film about the intersection of art and parenthood. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind director Michel Gondry combines a s…
MIFF Review: GEN_: Grief, Gender, and the Fight to Exist
There’s something quietly shattering about GEN_, something that lodges under your skin and hums there for days. Directed by Gianluca Matarrese, this deeply intimate documentary slips past rhetoric and…
MIFF Review: One More Shot is a great Aussie indie treat
New Year’s Eve 1999 and anaesthetist Minnie (Emily Browning) starts her day with a reminder that she’s not got her life together in the manner she thought she would have. Her patient in obstetrics tur…
MIFF Review: Exit 8 loops its protagonist—and its audience—in a psychologically draining descent
Exit 8 is an inventive and repetitive exercise in expanding what was once a simple video game into a character-driven psychological horror. Based on the 2023 adventure game The Exit 8 by developer Kot…
MIFF Review: First Light is an astonishing debut feature from James J. Robinson
First Light is an astonishing debut feature from acclaimed Australian photographer James J. Robinson, and a film perfectly placed in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Bright Horizons competi…
She Rides Shotgun shows the quiet fury of a girl becoming
She Rides Shotgun isn’t your typical action thriller, and thank god for that. It’s not flashy or overstuffed with gunfire just for the sake of spectacle. Instead, it’s grounded — raw, even — and it hi…
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud shows that capitalism is the real horror and it's coming for you in a box
There’s a special kind of horror that doesn’t scream or slash—it creeps up on you in the form of unchecked ambition, of algorithms, of the unshakable feeling that someone’s always watching. Kiyoshi Ku…